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Currant Cake
1/2 cup butter 1/2 cup milk 1 cup sugar 2 cups flour 2 eggs 3 teaspoons baking powder Yolk 1 egg 1 cup currants mixed with 1 tablespoon flour Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and eggs and egg yolk well beaten. Then add milk, flour mixed and sifted with baking powder, and currants. Bake forty minutes in buttered and floured cake pan.
A plain creamed butter cake studded with dried currants, written in the shorthand of turn-of-the-century cookery schools: the ingredient list first, the method compressed into three sentences. The only real gap is the oven temperature, which the original assumes you know.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A moderate oven, about 350F, suits a butter cake of this size and the stated forty minutes. Check at 35 minutes with a skewer in the centre.
- Currants, not red currantsThese are dried Zante currants, a small seedless raisin, sold in the baking aisle. Fresh red or black currants are a different fruit entirely and would ruin the batter's balance.
- Why the tablespoon of flourTossing the currants in flour keeps them from sinking through a fairly loose batter and from clumping together. Do the tossing after the fruit is dry, and add it last with a few folds only.
- Soaking the fruitOlder currants can be stony. A five-minute soak in hot water, then drained and patted dry before flouring, gives a softer crumb without adding moisture to the batter.
- Whole egg plus a yolkThe extra yolk adds richness. Beat the two eggs and the yolk together thoroughly before they go in, as the recipe directs.
- FlourPlain all-purpose flour; two cups is roughly 250 g. The baking powder is already accounted for, so do not substitute self-raising flour.
- Pan and yieldAn 8-inch square or 8- or 9-inch round pan suits this quantity, or a standard loaf tin if you prefer slices. Butter and flour it as directed, or line with parchment. Makes about 8 to 10 servings.
- StorageFruited butter cakes of this type improve on the second day. Keep it wrapped at room temperature rather than refrigerated, which dries the crumb.
The method here, creaming butter with sugar gradually and adding sifted flour and baking powder together, is the standard American cooking-school formula of the 1890s, repeated in hundreds of household manuals; a cook who learned it could produce a dozen variations by changing the fruit or flavouring. Dried currants were a cheap and durable pantry staple, which is why they turn up in so much modest home baking on both sides of the Atlantic. The name is a lasting confusion: these currants take their name from Corinth, by way of the medieval trade in "raisins of Corauntz", and have nothing to do with the garden currant bush.